Article excerpt

As I have indicated to other committees of the Congress in recent days, our burgeoning structural budget deficit, unless addressed, will increasingly threaten the stability of our economic system. Time is no longer on our side. At 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), the current deficit is very large by historical standards. After declining through 1996, the current services deficit starts on an inexorable upward path again. On a cyclically adjusted or structural basis, the deficit has hovered around 3 percent of potential GDP for the past ten years, a phenomenon without precedent in our peacetime history.

I am encouraged that the President and the Congress are making serious efforts to restore a measure of balance to our fiscal affairs.

It is beguiling to contemplate the downtrend in inflation in recent years in the context of very large budget deficits and to conclude that the concerns about their adverse effects on the economy have been misplaced. Regrettably, this notion is dubious. The deficit is a corrosive force that already has begun to eat away at the foundations of our economic strength. Financing of private capital investment has been crowded out, and, not surprisingly, the United States has experienced a lower level of net investment relative to GDP than any other of the Group of Seven countries in the past decade.

To some degree, the impact of the federal budget deficits over the past decade has been muted as we imported resources to help finance them. This can be seen in our large trade and current account deficits. However, we should not--indeed, we probably cannot--rely on foreign sources of funds indefinitely. If we do nothing, the markets will ultimately force an adjustment; by acting now to redress our internal imbalance, we can lower the risk of unpleasant stresses down the road.

I shall eschew, as I have in previous testimonies, comments on the specific elements of the deficit-reduction proposals currently under review by the Congress. I should like, nonetheless, to take the time you have made available to outline my views on the principles that should underlie current deliberations.

First, according to both the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office, deficits are likely to be held in check by relatively good economic performance over the next few years. But from 1997 on, budget outlays under existing law are projected to rise appreciably faster than the tax base. If such trends are not altered, stabilizing the deficit-to-GDP ratio solely from the receipts side, not to mention reducing it, will necessarily require ever-increasing tax rates. This would surely undercut incentives for risktaking and inevitably damp the long-term growth and tax revenue potential of our economy. The gap between spending and revenues will not close under such conditions. Thus, there is no alternative to achieving much slower growth of outlays if deficit control is our objective. This implies the need not only to make cuts now, but also to control the growth of future spending so that it does not exceed, and preferably is less than, the projected growth in the tax base.

The thought expressed by some that we can inflate our way out of the budget deficit is fanciful. Aside from its serious debilitating effects on our economic system, higher inflation, given the explicit and implicit indexing of receipts and expenditures, would not reduce the deficit. As I indicated in testimony to the Joint Economic Committee in January, there is a possibility that productivity has moved into a significantly faster long-term growth channel, which would boost real growth and tax revenues over time. But even if that turns out to be the case, short of an increase beyond anything that we can reasonably anticipate at this time, productivity, in itself, would not be enough to resolve the basic long-term imbalance in our budgetary accounts. Thus, while economic growth is necessary to contain budget deficits, it regrettably is not sufficient. …